1942 … and Australia is at war with Germany. Communist Russia is our ally. But our military intelligence treats Australian Communists as the enemy, even though US General Douglas Macarthur, who is leading Australian forces at this time, supports the Communist-led People’s Army. Not China’s people’s army—but Australia’s. All rather confusing. Meanwhile Bill Wood, a leader of this Australian “People’s Army” and editor of the weekly journal Progress, asks one of our spies why his phone is being tapped. “You do know, don’t you, that we’re comrades now? Moscow’s in the war on your side, Major. They have informed your section?” More HERE.

When editing RED, I had to leave out many episodes to keep the book to 600 pages. One of those episodes took place on the day Lesley, who was administrator of Sydney’s New Theatre in 1943, arrived to find the stage destroyed and the lighting switchboard removed. This was part of a dispute with the theatre’s landlord. More HERE.

In 1940 the artist Roy Dalgarno was told by the military that he must leave Bedarra Island where he was working with fellow artist Noel Wood. “They’d apparently planned on building some sort of military establishment there,” Dalgarno explains, “and they considered me a security risk. A security risk? Because I was a Communist or a member of the Left Book Club.” More of this story HERE.

One of Dalgarno’s paintings when living in north Queensland, “Hartley’s Creek: the Lagoon” (1941). Collection: Lynn Dalgarno

“In many ways, the book is an intellectual history from below”, a “genre-crossing biographical study … in the form of a novel” but “based on extensive research” which, “from a scholarly viewpoint, is hugely rich and impressive.” RED is “a truly original piece of literature, in many ways a political prose-poem.” — Rowan Cahill in Labor History